4 Ekim 2011 Salı

The perils of ‘too successful’ marketing, or why Turks don’t like Orhan Pamuk

Alper H. YAĞCI

A foreign
friend of mine has recently asked me the question and I am writing this essay
as an attempt at an answer: Why is it so difficult to find a fan of Orhan Pamuk
in Turkey? We have a veritable puzzle: The man is a Nobel laureate, considered
worldwide as one of the major writers of his generation and, for that matter,
he is a best-seller in the country in question. Yet, when you ask a literate
Turk about Pamuk, the answer you are likely to hear is, “I gave up his book
after fifty pages or so.” Who is buying all those books, and why don’t we like
our only Nobel laureate?

The
bitterest criticisms usually start with words of praise. Let me make it clear:
This essay will begin by praising Pamuk, and will continue pretty much doing
that all along. If I were to be asked, The Black Book alone would suffice to
put him in the pantheon of the greatest novelists of all time. Despite that he
has been phoning in his work a bit lately, the author still has a lot of credit
to spend. I will address my criticism toward Turkish readers at large. And
Pamuk’s commercial agents. And the media. Politicians will be blamed at some
point, as well as certain characteristics of the Turkish language. Anyone
besides me, basically, because I really am a fan of Pamuk’s literary work.

My first
encounter with the author was through My Name is Red. The book had just come
out in Turkey, with the provocative, puzzling title, and a hauntingly beautiful
and curious cover. It looked like a thing that you would want to buy, take
home, open and play with. This kind
of book cover and the publicity that introduced it was not common in Turkey.
Plain, grave, ascetic images was the norm as far as covering “high literature”
was concerned, whereas Pamuk’s book looked like it belonged to the realm of
entertainment. The content was difficult to classify, too. To me, it was
appealing at various levels: the child in me was caught up in the mystery of
what was at surface a whodunit story; the history geek in me enjoyed traversing
the Ottoman world the novel constructed; and the adolescent philosopher that I
was becoming was intrigued by the questions raised by the novel's central
theme; creating a self by imitating others.

Few
seemed to share my experience, with My Name is Red as with his other books.
People found Pamuk’s writing style tedious, his sentences too long, his
characters unlikable, and his references undesirably oriental – “he makes
Turkey sound like a Middle Eastern country,” they would often complain. Pamuk
was like nothing they read, and they didn’t like it.

Part of
the answer to my question may be related to what they had read before. The
Turkish readership had been treated to a completely different tradition. From
the 1950s to around 1980, a politically weak but intellectually central
left-wing weltanschauung (with variants ranging from all kinds of socialism to
Turkey’s own anti-imperialist brand Kemalism) determined what reading was good
for, and what was there to read. In this ideologically charged atmosphere,
which penetrated universities more than anywhere else, reading literary fiction
was part of the package that marked a cool young person. Not all kinds of
literature, though: what was especially appreciated was the social realism and
naturalism of mainly Russian and French writers. Not only Dostoyevsky, Hugo,
Turgenev, Steinbeck but also those like Gorki, Zola, or the now largely
forgotten Panait Istrati enjoyed considerable popularity. On the other hand,
the incredibly rich English literature, for instance, was mostly untapped. Oğuz
Atay’s now-famous novel Tutunamayanlar (1973), which introduced to the Turkish
readership the intellectual games of the (post)modernist kind for the first
belated time, went unnoticed. Reading fiction was an instrument in political
cultivation, and a ritual in the making of what was a community with its own
social codes. I don’t mean to draw a caricature; some of the best in Turkish
literature, including Yaşar Kemal and Orhan Kemal, was produced and consumed in
this milieu. But many others rode alongside these giants and made a following,
not because they were of the same literary caliber but because they appealed to
the same populist politics.

After the
punitive right-wing military coup of 1980, this community was unmade. A lot of
people were simply crushed: under torture, in prison, to exile. For others it
was just an issue of growing up and finding other things to do in life, like
establishing a middle class family. Among the former left-wing activist the
most savvy TV commercial producers and the most unscrupulous businessmen would
rise. In the meantime, the political regime decided to promote at schools a
puerile nationalism blended with religious conservatism, while silencing
subversive intellectuals. In the annals of state of the time, one can find
literal commands aimed at keeping the youth from reading—not only from reading
“dangerous” stuff, but from reading in general. Unfortunately, they were highly
successful.

Orhan
Pamuk began his career facing such unpredictable odds. The old tradition was
lost, but there was no preparation for what could replace it. Pamuk was a
writer of the unfamiliar type: He was intensely interested in himself and his
own literary journey. His stylistic influences—his forebears Joyce, Borges,
Cortazar, Calvino, as well as his contemporaries Rushdie and Eco—were largely
unheard of in the country. To the boringly pro-Western literati of Turkey, his
references to Ottoman and medieval Islamic scholars and poets sounded
irrelevant at best and hostile at worst. His first three books, each achieving
wider and wider critical success, were read by small communities of academic
size. Then things got big in 1990 with the publication of The Black Book. While
the standard novel in Turkey would be printed 2,500 copies (yes, the readership
for fiction in Turkey remains embarrassingly small), The Black Book aimed much
higher, and, with an accompanying publicity campaign hitherto unknown in
Turkey, it achieved a sale of 60,000 in its first couple of years. Pamuk became
something like the first best-selling author of post-1980 Turkey, and this was
bizarre given the unfamiliar structure and the demanding content of his work.
The same odd outcome was repeated with the following title, The New Life
(1994). And with the My Name is Red (1998). The latter was printed in 50,000
copies in its first edition, as a commercial tour de force and a publicity
strategy on its own right. It worked, and the number was raised to 100,000 for
Snow (2002). And do not forget to add considerable amount of pirated copies to
these official figures.

A caricature of Pamuk dressed as a woman for the cover of his imaginary next book, as an allusion to his commercial rival Elif Shafak's pose as a man for her last book Iskender's cover. The caricature was published in Cumhuriyet , a nationalist-republican newspaper often critical of Pamuk.

By this
point in the story, Pamuk was a literary giant at the world scale yet few in
Turkey seemed to like his books. Many established writers complained, accusing
him to be a writer of doubtful talent who rides on the success of marketing. Journalists tried to make allegations of plagiarism.[1]As
I noted above, I do not doubt Pamuk as an author. But the complaint about
marketing has a point: Publicity put books like The Black Book into homes where
no other writer than Barbara Cartland and Agatha Christie had entered before.
Many who bought Pamuk’s books had never read anything of that caliber. Just as
they would not have liked Mann or Proust had they tried to read them, they did
not like Pamuk either. In this sense, he sold too many books to the wrong
people.

To be
fair in my criticism of Turkish literary taste, I should note for the foreign
reader that the kind of uneasiness one feels when faced with a Pamuk text in
Turkish is very much worth considering. Pamuk may often sound bizarre in his
native language. He writes in long sentences that contain lists of stuff
(events, people, things) in a cataloguing manner, constructed with “which”
clauses. Because in Turkish verbs are found at the end of sentences, it may be
quite taxing for the reader to decipher the meaning of such constructions, and
for that reason few writers would prefer to use them as frequently. (Excessive
agglutination that is characteristic of the Turkish language doesn’t help the
reader in this either). Before fame Pamuk’s speech used to be stuttering; it is
perhaps not surprising that he has never attained a very fluent Turkish in
writing either. Yes, there is a certain lyricism in his novels but this effect
is achieved mostly by the dramatic construction of the plot, resting on an
unmistakably mathematical design, rather than by the musicality of the language
that describes it. The voice is not that of an amusing troubadour pleasing to
the ear; but that of a wildly intelligent and logical mind that has to struggle
with the obstacle of linguistic expression in order to tell to people what he
has to say. And sometimes he is not totally successful in that struggle. A
critical reviewer found many grammar errors in The Black Book and declared
Pamuk a deficient writer. He was asking, is it possible to be a bad writer yet
a good novelist? I would answer, yes, apparently it is. But the question
becomes irrelevant to foreign readership, who read Pamuk through polished
translations and find his syntax suitable to the structure of the European
languages anyway.

The world
narrated in Pamuk’s novels is also unfamiliar ground for the conventional
literary taste in the country. The foreign reader might think that Pamuk is
reviving through literary imagination a country of majesty, mystery, and exotic
peculiarities, and as such giving it back the charm that was lost to the
culturally sterile Kemalist republican revolution. They might think that the
author is recreating what was already there and suppressed by the secularist
nationalist imagination. Actually Pamuk’s whole literary project can be said to
amount to a parody of the idea that there is an essence of things (be it a
personality, a city, or a whole nation’s culture) to be unearthed beneath the
aspirations and masks found on the surface. Pamuk rather constructs a highly
original Istanbul, one that he distills through readings of (post)modern
mystery fiction, medieval Islamic romances, and urban architects like Dickens,
Dostoyevsky, and Joyce. More a collage than a palimpsest, the Istanbul that
surfaces in his books is made up of pieces of literary imagination with such
diverse sources, as befitting the multiple historical layers that are in an
eternal contest with each other over the “real” identity of the city. In
effect, Pamuk is singing a new Istanbul into existence, a fascinatingly rich,
sad, and grotesque one.

To the
sterile aesthetic sensibilities of the aspirant Turkish bourgeoisie, this is
not a desirable project. This is neither the place they would like to imagine
themselves living in, nor the place to show to their foreign friends as home.
On the other hand, the more politically left-wing would be disconcerted by the
fact that Pamuk substitutes his own Hegelian obsession with identity and
difference for the bread-and-butter concerns that mark the everyday lives of
common Turkish folk. Foreign readership with Orientalist preconceptions may
think that Muslim people primarily eat, drink and breath identity but many
Muslims would tell you otherwise, if only you were not listening to them
through Pamuk’s novels. In Pamuk’s world, people do not worry about how to pay
for things, they worry about what names to give to them, in constant anxiety
over the cultural baggage that would come with it. In the meantime, they are
often overridden with guilt, melancholy, even cynicism; whereas solidarity,
inspiration, hope are scarcely found. Not all would think that “high literature”
has to be this gloomy about what makes people tick.

Add to
all this Pamuk’s persona as a public intellectual, and his political quibbles.
An upper-class Istanbulite by birth and by hearth, the author has been silent
when it comes to populist concerns that Turkish literary figures are often
expected to assume in a Narodnik pose; and outspoken only in those questions
like the Turkish state’s treatment of intellectuals and Kurdish insurgent
activists, in addition to being adamant about the protection of intellectual
property against piracy. Now, this is not quite the formula for success if you
want to be well liked in Turkey. The low point in his popularity came when he
said, in an interview with a German magazine in early 2005, “Thirty thousand Kurds
have been killed here, and a million Armenians. And almost nobody dares to
mention that. So I do.” The reaction from Turkey was swift and damning. Some
were worried that he was assigning a number so easily (and so high) to the
much-contested size of the Armenian population killed during the forced
deportations of 1915. Some others were disturbed by hearing the number of the
Kurdish guerilla casualties (most of whom were killed in combat) put, without
any explanation of the context, alongside the massacred Armenian civilians.
Probably many more were just angry that he dared to report these issues to
foreign media. Pamuk easily became a hated figure among those who never read
him. And to the many who tried to read and didn’t like him, the incident provided
an easy way to get around the question of his talents as an author. “He is one
of those intellectuals who is trying to be famous by insulting his country,
because that’s what foreign media likes to hear,” would be their answer, if
asked about Pamuk and the Nobel Prize he received.

We are
left with the awkward situation that we mostly don’t understand our only Nobel
laureate, don’t like him when we do understand, and he doesn't seem to care
about being liked by us, either. Something must have gone terribly wrong and I
genuinely don’t know whom to blame: Pamuk? Turks? Swedes? One thing we know for
sure, because I told you that in the beginning: It could be anyone besides me.

Notes[1] Popular history writer Murat Bardakçı’s claims have been the most well-publicized. Bardakçı noted similarities between the plot in TheWhite Castle, where an Italian falls captive to Ottoman corsairs and lives in Istanbul for years as a slave, with a 16th century autobiography of a Spaniard with a similar experience. This, of course, is plagiarism in the sense that Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra plagiarized the actual lives of Antony and Cleopatra. (Some editions of White Castle included a bibliographic note enlisting such sources of inspiration). Bardakçı also thought My Name is Red was a plagiarism of Norman Mailer’s Ancient Evenings, because both novels were historical (though they were set about twenty seven centuries apart) and they both relied on a point-of-view narrative structure. But historical novels and point of view narratives were known to humanity long before either publication. To escape embarrassment, Bardakçı later dropped Mailer’s name and kept accusing Pamuk of plagiarizing a “well-known American author.”

6 yorum:

Don't you think that the quality of his writing has changed a lot? Ok, I'm one of those whom to blame. I don't like his political stance, I won't talk about it though. But I loved his early novels, Black Book, My name is Red, actually pretty much anything he wrote until the Snow. Starting from Snow, his writing got simpler and I think he purposely started to target 'wrong' people. I would even say wrong people has become right to him. The Museum of Innocence is an insult to his own past and the peak of commercialization of his literature I think.

Two more reflections on this:- Here there is a news story (in Turkish): http://www.radikal.com.tr/Radikal.aspx?aType=RadikalDetayV3&CategoryID=77&ArticleID=1072948 It’s about a scientific study that demonstrates that the mental processing of Turkish sentences takes almost twice as much brain activity as of English and German ones. The researchers explain this difference by the Turkish syntax and the agglutination of verbs, which, together, require the reader to first run the sentence until finding the verb (which typically is in the end) and then recall the whole sentence again to dress it up in light of what the verb reveals.

- I’ve just discovered the alleged ‘non-readability’ of Pamuk in Argentina as well! Fabian Casas, a poet and essayist, and an admirer of Pamuk it seems, complains that people find it hard to finish Pamuk’s books. Himself having read Pamuk only in Spanish, he then goes on, ironically, to ask “How would it be to read Pamuk in Turkish, in his original language? It’s one thing to see a star in the sky and feel the influence of its cosmic pressure or its beauty in the dusk, it’s another thing to walk along the grand Martian valleys and dwell over the red soil that has thrilled our imagination so much.”